I'm taking the New Year's Pledge! Want to join me?

As I posted earlier today, since I've decided that 2009 was the year to put my health as The No. 1 Priority, and I want to hold myself accountable to it, what better place to put it out there than on my blog. Eek!!!

I know you can all help me keep my goals in check (and I do thank you in advance for your support.....), and I hope that by the same token, you will all make your health a priority this coming year. We can do this together!

I was browsing around on the web this afternoon, and I went to the VegCooking website, and saw this little green button that called my name. It said: "Take the Veg Pledge!" - and I know I can't change everything over night, but for the past few weeks, a lot has changed in my level of awareness in matters of the treatments of animals raised for consumption, even the 'free-range' ones, and my heart just aches and I cannot turn a blind eye.

So, as part of eating healthier and working on losing a lot of the excess weight that currently adorns my body, I've rejoined Weight Watchers online, and I will be using their brand new "Momentum - Simply Filling" program (a better version of the old CORE - no point counting plan).

I used to be on the Weight Watchers Flex Points before and I couldn't stand counting points and I got really obsessed by it (I'm sure that I'm obsessive-compulsive to a large degree), and it was taking over my life and it wasn't working. I was miserable. But, at the time, I didn't feel like I could handle the 'Core' way of doing WW, so I just gave up.

But I got an email this morning (Thanks Weight Watchers!) with this new Momentum plan and I could re-enroll and they would waive the sign-up fee. So I checked it out, and my gosh, it looks like something I can actually do and succeed at :-)

And, as a matter of fact, the Simply Filling way of doing the Momentum plan certainly favors a vegetarian and vegan lifestyle, eating filling (high fiber, highly nutritional food items, mainly vegetable, grains, legumes), and so I figured, why not combine the two and take the New Year's 30 day pledge to go veg , and really focus on eating healthy while also putting my mind at ease, because let me tell you, it hasn't been easy for me to eat much meat this month. It upsets me a lot, and in order to feel good with myself, I have to eat more vegetarian and vegan meals, so this pledge will certainly help me in many ways.

It's part of what I had been thinking of doing as I had mentionned to my girlfriend Susmitha a few weeks back... I just said that I had an idea for a plan and that I was going to do it on my blog (I was planning on doing a weekly blog feature about my journey to becoming veg). So, this pledge is the start of a very enlightning journey.

I'm sure there will be plenty of challenges along the way (including my allergies to soy, tofu, etc), but there's lots of things to eat and one can modify recipes too.

I hope you will join me. I know that it's not for everybody, but most people think that they need to lose a bit of weight, so paying attention to what we eat for 30 days, and also incorporating more legumes, vegetables and whole grains in our diets can only benefit all of us in the end.

If you're reading this and you decide to take the pledge starting as of January 1st (we still have time to grab some healthy foods/groceries to get started on the right foot!) - Leave me a comment on this post, and come back to let me know how you're doing.

I'd sure love to hear from you, and know that we're doing this together and that we can support eachother and exchange some cool recipes :)

For those that are wondering, there's some great info here in the VegCooking website about transitioning.

Here's to better health and less cruelty to animals...